Handover, which is the transfer of a communications session from cell to another, is an important aspect of any mobile communication system attempting to provide continuous service to wireless devices moving about a network. The transfer of the connection from one cell to another may depend on factors such as signal strength, load conditions, service requirements, or a combination thereof. Efficient and effective handovers are those that are effected with a minimum number of unnecessary handovers, minimum number of handover failures, minimum handover delay, etc., which may affect not only the Quality of Service, QoS, of the user equipment, UE, but also the overall mobile network capacity and performance.
Handover failure may occur when a wireless device is handed over to a cell that is not active. One such scenario when handover failure might occur includes when a cell identifier is wrong. For example, a UE may report only a physical cell identity when reporting an event that triggers mobility towards a target node. Such physical identity can be the physical cell identifier, PCI, for Evolved Universal Mobile Telecommunications System Terrestrial Radio Access, E-UTRAN; the physical scrambling codes, PSC, for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System Terrestrial Radio Access, UTRAN; and/or other suitable physical identity for another system. In certain scenarios, this physical identity may be associated to a neighbor cell relationship between the source cell and a target cell. Thus, related cells may use the same physical layer identity but have cell configuration parameters (e.g. E-CGI) that are different from the cell identified and reported by the UE. As a result, a mobility procedure may be started towards a cell that cannot be identified correctly by the parameters contained in the handover preparation messages sent by the source serving node. Furthermore, the optimal mobility settings from the source radio access technology to E-UTRAN is typically not the same when the cell configuration in the eNodeB is changed. As a result, the source radio access technology does not know how to perform mobile handover to the target eNodeB with sufficient capacity and/or energy efficiency.